Ross Perot tried to beat The Establishment via a third party. The Reps and Dims have the election process all sewed up for them, making it impossible for any other party's candidate to even have a slim chance.
The only way to have other political parties with any chance is for the Dims to continue to implode as it is doing now.
As I've repeatedly stated, the only way for other parties to stand a chance is to have their candidates elected at the lowest local levels. It will be painstakingly slow but is possible.
^ Best answer. Texas was still largely a Democratic Party state, even if they voted for the occasional Republican for the Presidency; it wan't until the drunken idiot Ann Richards decided to toss the moderate liberals like Bob Bullock under the bus and pander to her idiot Austin drinking buddies like Molly Ivins and the dumbass 'radical' trust fund hippie who ran her campaign that the state swung GOP across the board, when George W. ran for Gov. She could have won easily, nobody really liked the moron, but given the choice between a bunch of armchair trust fund commies hanging out in Austin being Perpetual Teenagers Stuck In The Sixties and a right wing rich kid, well, nothing to lose with the dumbass rich kid' at least his friends were not commies and could read a financial report.
Perot was just another rich guy with a big ego, for sure, but he was also raised with the progressive Texas ideals, now derided as 'populist', as if that were 'something bad', and he was fairly sincere in trying to uphold those values in govt. He saw the cause as lost, and dropped out. People don't realize a lot of these Texas billionaires and millionaires from his era were not elitists or even anti-labor; the oil patches paid very good money, more than enough for a lot of dirt poor people to indeed pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do very well, even compete with their former bosses if they so chose to, and employed a lot of people. That was their world, and it's also true they didn't understand the other worlds and thought their values also were the norm in other industries, but they were wrong, of course.
When I was a kid, you could go downtown and meet a lot of very wealthy people, they had offices and regular jobs, and you wouldn't be able to distinguish them from anybody else, until you got to their houses, lol. They were not isolated from their own employees, hung out with working people, etc. They might have 'far right wing views', like the 'value of hard work', because they themselves got ahead that way, and also rewarded it in their own businesses, so they weren't being 'phoney' about it. they were somewhat naive about the ag business monopolies, though, and the manufacturing sector's abuses, that sort of thing, because they never worked in those fiields, they worked the oil patches, and Perot was a salesman, not a boss, and got wealthy by being on the ground floor of the tech industry, which was also a lot more 'egalitarian' and open to new comers who worked hard in its early years as well.
